Tuesday, 25 June 2013

WIRED News: Enlightenment Engineer - In Silicon Valley, Meditation Is No Fad, It Could Make Your Career

On 18th June 2013, the tech magazine WIRED Online posted an article in it's Business>Entrepreneurs section titled: Enlightenment Engineer - In Silicon Valley, Meditation Is No Fad, It Could Make Your Career.

Here are some interesting quotes from the article:

"We blink, smile at one another, and look around our makeshift zendo—a
long, fluorescent-lit presentation room on Google’s corporate campus in
Silicon Valley. Meng and most of his pupils are Google employees, and
this meditation class is part of an internal course called Search Inside
Yourself. It’s designed to teach people to manage their emotions,
ideally making them better workers in the process.
[...]
More than a thousand Googlers have been through Search Inside
Yourself training. Another 400 or so are on the waiting list and take
classes like Neural Self-Hacking and Managing Your Energy in the
meantime. Then there is the company’s bimonthly series of “mindful
lunches,” conducted in complete silence except for the ringing of prayer
bells, which began after the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited in 2011. The search giant even recently built a labyrinth for walking meditations.
It’s not just Google that’s embracing Eastern traditions. Across the
Valley, quiet contemplation is seen as the new caffeine, the fuel that
allegedly unlocks productivity and creative bursts. Classes in
meditation and mindfulness—paying close, nonjudgmental attention—have
become staples at many of the region’s most prominent companies. There’s
a Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute
now teaching the Google meditation method to whoever wants it. The
cofounders of Twitter and Facebook have made contemplative practices key
features of their new enterprises, holding regular in-office meditation
sessions and arranging for work routines that maximize mindfulness.
Some 1,700 people showed up at a Wisdom 2.0 conference held in San Francisco this winter, with top executives from LinkedIn, Cisco, and Ford featured among the headliners.
[...]
Steve Jobs spent months searching for gurus in India and was married
by a Zen priest. Before he became an American Buddhist pioneer, Jack
Kornfield ran one of the first mainframes at Harvard Business School.
But in today’s Silicon Valley, there’s little patience for what many
are happy to dismiss as “hippie bullshit.” Meditation here isn’t an
opportunity to reflect upon the impermanence of existence but a tool to
better oneself and improve productivity. That’s how Bill Duane, a
pompadoured onetime engineer with a tattoo of a bikini-clad woman on his
forearm, frames Neural Self-Hacking, an introductory meditation class
he designed for Google. “Out in the world, a lot of this stuff is
pitched to people in yoga pants,” he says. “But I wanted to speak to my
people. I wanted to speak to me. I wanted to speak to the grumpy
engineer who may be an atheist, who may be a rationalist.”

Duane’s pitch starts with neuroscience and evolutionary biology. “We’re
basically the descendants of nervous monkeys,” he says, the kind with
hair-trigger fight-or-flight responses. In the modern workplace, these
hyperactive reflexes are now a detriment, turning minor squabbles into
the emotional equivalents of kill-or-be-killed showdowns. In such
situations, the amygdala—the region of the brain believed to be
responsible for processing fear—can override the rest of the mind’s
ability to think logically. We become slaves to our monkey minds.
[...]
But Googlers don’t take up meditation just to keep away the sniffles or
get a grip on their emotions. They are also using it to understand their
coworkers’ motivations, to cultivate their own “emotional
intelligence”—a characteristic that tends to be in short supply among
the engineering set. “Everybody knows this EI thing is good for their
career,” says Search Inside Yourself founder Meng. “And every company
knows that if their people have EI, they’re gonna make a shitload of
money.”
[...]
Duane, for one, credits Google’s meditation program with upgrading
both his business and personal life. It wasn’t long ago that he was a
stress case, and with good reason: He was leading a 30-person
site-reliability team while dealing with his father’s life-threatening
heart disease. “My typical coping strategy—the bourbon and cheeseburger
method—wasn’t working,” he says. Then Duane attended a lecture Meng
arranged on the neuroscience of mindfulness and quickly adopted a
meditation practice of his own.
Duane believes the emotional regulation he gained from meditation
helped him cope with his father’s eventual death. The increased ability
to focus, he says, was a major factor in his promotion to a management
post where he oversaw nearly 150 Googlers. In January he decided to
leave the company’s cadre of engineers and concentrate full-time on
bringing meditation to more of the organization. Google executives, who
have put mindfulness at the center of their internal training efforts,
OK’d the switch.
[...]
In 2013 nearly 1,700 signed up to hear headliners like Arianna
Huffington, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams,
and, of course, Meng talk about how they run their enterprises
mindfully. Gordhamer has become a Silicon Valley superconnector, with an
array of contacts that would make an ordinary entrepreneur burst with
envy. He now leads private retreats for the technorati, and more
conferences are in the works—one just for women, another to be held in
New York City. “Everywhere you turn at Wisdom,” says PayPal cofounder
Luke Nosek, “it’s like, ‘Oh my God, you’re here too?’”
[...]
On an enclosed porch outside the exhibition hall at this year’s Wisdom
2.0 event, Zen-monk-turned-CEO Marc Lesser talks about his plans to take
the Search Inside Yourself training to companies everywhere.
Plantronics, Farmers Insurance, and VMware have already signed up.
Nearby, companies promoting mindfulness apps and “cloud-based platforms
for market professionals” hawk their wares while an acoustic guitar
player strums. On the main stage, executives discuss how they maintain
mindful practices during the workweek: One wakes up early and focuses on
his upcoming meetings; another takes a moment to pause as she dries her
hands in the bathroom. In the cavernous, wood-paneled main hall,
oversize screens show a silhouette of a brain connected to a lotus
flower and the logos for Twitter and Facebook. "